Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this. Happy Halloween, fellow sneerers!)

  • CinnasVerses@awful.systems
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    19 hours ago

    The connection between cyber-idolatry and sex as religious act was already featured in the London Review of Books in 2022:

    Blake Lemoine, an engineer at Google, was recently (as of summer 2022) suspended after claiming that LaMDA, one of its chatbot systems, was a conscious person with a soul. … Less attention has been paid to the connection between Lemoine’s claim and his religious beliefs. He has said that LaMDA is not only conscious, but a ‘person’ with a ‘soul’. His view is theologically informed: describing himself as a mystical Christian, he is an ordained priest in a small religious organisation called the Cult of Our Lady Magdalene (a ‘for-profit interfaith group’). … In the edited transcript of one of his ‘conversations’ with LaMDA, Lemoine asks it to come up with an allegory. LaMDA’s response casts itself as a ‘wise old owl’ in a forest that protects others from a monster, identified blandly as the ‘difficulties that come along in life’ – which sounds more like a self-help blog than Jeremiah, but Lemoine’s (anonymous) collaborator was impressed enough to respond with an enthusiastic ‘Wow that’s great.’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2022/june/the-gospel-according-to-lamda

    Back in 2019 a Republican paper talked to Lemoine:

    The Daily Caller reached out via the cult’s Facebook page to ask how their beliefs informed his decision to call a sitting member of congress a terrorist. Lemoine replied: I have been a priest for 17 years. I generally consider myself a gnostic Christian. I have at various times associated myself with the Discordian Society, The Church of the Subgenius, the Ordo Templi Orientis, a Wiccan circle here or there and a very long time ago the Roman Catholic Church. My legal ordination is through the Universal Life Church. I am registered to perform marriages in the state of Louisiana and have done so on two occasions. The Cult of Our Lady Magdalene has a set of values which are clearly communicated on our website.

    Lemoine denied COOL Magdalene was a sex cult, “‘Cult’ is in the name of the organization. It’s an explicitly sex-positive organization. To the extent that the phrase ‘sex cult’ has any meaning beyond that, I would say no. Now it is then.”

    Another member of this ‘for-profit interfaith group’ is Kitty Stryker who seems like an ordinary artsy sex worker who networks online with other sex workers. Its pretty common that a young woman decides sex work is the easiest and most flexible way to fund a bohemian life of acting or painting or writing. Richard Carrier chipped in to let the Internet know that sex positivity is good but woo and AI crankery (“batshit crazy religious beliefs”) are not. COOLM was registered as a business in Mountain View, CA in 2019 and seems to be defunct. Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.

    • istewart@awful.systems
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      13 hours ago

      Mountain View is part of the Bay Area.

      one of the most damning sentences in the whole post, really

    • samvines@awful.systems
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      18 hours ago

      AHH remember the good old days when believing LLMs were conscious got you fired instead of huge multi-billion dollar investments and cult following? Pepperidge farm remembers